Joseph Stiglitz at Project Syndicate writes—After Neoliberalism. For the past 40 years, the United States and other advanced economies have been pursuing a free-market agenda of low taxes, deregulation, and cuts to social programs. There can no longer be any doubt that this approach has failed spectacularly; the only question is what will – and should – come next. Some people, me included, argue for democratic socialism. Stiglitz—a Nobel laureate in economics, professor at Columbia University, and chief economist at the Roosevelt Institute—has a different idea:
What kind of economic system is most conducive to human wellbeing? That question has come to define the current era, because, after 40 years of neoliberalism in the United States and other advanced economies, we know what doesn’t work.
The neoliberal experiment—lower taxes on the rich, deregulation of labor and product markets, financialization, and globalization—has been a spectacular failure. Growth is lower than it was in the quarter-century after World War II, and most of it has accrued to the very top of the income scale. After decades of stagnant or even falling incomes for those below them, neoliberalism must be pronounced dead and buried.
Vying to succeed it are at least three major political alternatives: far-right nationalism, center-left reformism, and the progressive left (with the center-right representing the neoliberal failure). And yet, with the exception of the progressive left, these alternatives remain beholden to some form of the ideology that has (or should have) expired.
The center-left, for example, represents neoliberalism with a human face. Its goal is to bring the policies of former US President Bill Clinton and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair into the twenty-first century, making only slight revisions to the prevailing modes of financialization and globalization. Meanwhile, the nationalist right disowns globalization, blaming migrants and foreigners for all of today’s problems. Yet as Donald Trump’s presidency has shown, it is no less committed—at least in its American variant—to tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, and shrinking or eliminating social programs.
By contrast, the third camp advocates what I call progressive capitalism, which prescribes a radically different economic agenda, based on four priorities. The first is to restore the balance between markets, the state, and civil society. Slow economic growth, rising inequality, financial instability, and environmental degradation are problems born of the market, and thus cannot and will not be overcome by the market on its own. Governments have a duty to limit and shape markets through environmental, health, occupational-safety, and other types of regulation. It is also the government’s job to do what the market cannot or will not do, like actively investing in basic research, technology, education, and the health of its constituents. [...]
A comprehensive agenda must focus on education, research, and the other true sources of wealth. It must protect the environment and fight climate change with the same vigilance as the Green New Dealers in the US and Extinction Rebellion in the United Kingdom. And it must provide public programs to ensure that no citizen is denied the basic requisites of a decent life. These include economic security, access to work and a living wage, health care and adequate housing, a secure retirement, and a quality education for one’s children. [...]
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“If all you want to talk about is wages but not the wage gap; marijuana but not criminal justice reform; trade deals but not labor; feminism but not trans rights, it’s YOU diminishing your electorate, not them.” ~~Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (2019)
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BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2006—Cheers: Wednesday:
If I may be so bold as to suggest that yesterday's news sucked…
Wall Street tanked (again), over a thousand more U.S. troops are going into Iraq to help Bush turn more corners, the Pentagon admits the insurgency is going to get worse, Afghanistan is falling apart, the death toll from the Indonesian earthquake is up to nearly six thousand, consumer confidence dropped in May, they didn't find Jimmy Hoffa (dammit...he's still got my watch), home foreclosures are on the rise, there's an investigation underway regarding a massacre of civilians in Iraq by our guys, a major car company is recalling a million vehicles because of faulty steering wheels (enjoy your commute this morning, Toyota owners), the Supreme Court squished federal whistleblowers under its thumb, a brick nearly went through our TV when Bill O'Reilly accused Jack Murtha last night of wanting to "cut and run," plus...
One year after her disappearance, Natalie Holloway astonishingly remains the #1 story in the media universe (now that American Idol has temporarily moved off the front page).
And if that wasn't bad enough, now we learn that global warming is going to cause aworldwide outbreak of mutant poison ivy.